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The folks at the NYTPicker, a blog that reports on the New York Times, took special notice of the corrections page in today’s paper. It is worth highlighting, as the Time published 36 corrections. (I recently profiled the NYTPicker for PBS MediaShift.)
Sunday is the biggest day for Times corrections. It’s when the paper corrects errors from the previous Sunday’s paper, which includes many special sections, as well the magazines. But, yes, 36 is a high number. From the NYTPicker:
It may or may not be a record — we don’t have the energy to plow through more than 100 years of back issues — but today’s NYT corrections column is large as any we’ve been able to find in recent memory. And it’s hard not to see the surge as a reflection of what happens to a newspaper that has lost more than 200 editorial employees to buyouts and layoffs in the last two years.
Other papers have seen an increase in corrections in the wake of layoffs and buyouts, but it’s tough to say if the number of corrections published by the Times has been on the rise. The paper uses an internal database to keep track of its corrections, so it has the data. (It’s also important to note that the number of corrections is not the same as the number of errors.)
This is the pick of the litter from today’s Times:
An article on Nov. 22 about the Dutch province of Friesland included a number of errors.
In reference to Friesland’s history, it was the feudal lords — not the Romans — who had no success conquering the Frisians in the 13th and 14th centuries. The Frisians were mostly Germanic people, not just Saxons, who had migrated there in the fourth and fifth centuries — not the first century. Friesland was considered an autonomous and proud region up to the 1500s — not “through” the Middle Ages. And it fell to the Habsburg Empire — not to the Holy Roman Empire — at the beginning of the 16th century. Also, while Friesland’s agrarian landscape is indeed dotted with terps, mounds measuring from a few to 20 feet high, terps are also found in the North Sea marshlands, encompassing parts of Holland, Germany and Denmark; the mounds are not found just in current-day Friesland.
Of the towns whose squares and alleys the writer explored, it was Stavoren — not Hindeloopen — that had a more prosperous seaport than Amsterdam up until the 1400s, not the 1700s. And the neighboring towns Stavoren and Hindeloopen, in addition to having a thriving trade with Scandinavia, also had a robust trade with the Baltic countries — but not with Russia.
A reader pointed out the errors in an e-mail message on Nov. 29; this correction was delayed for research.
